Apple updated the shipping estimates for its new Mac Pro desktop, with the US store now providing a shipping target of 5 to 6 weeks for new orders with either stock or custom configurations. International stores still report April as an estimated ship date, but these dates are likely to change now that the month has officially started.

This is one of several recent changes Apple has made to Mac Pro shipping estimates, with the company showing both March and April shipping targets earlier this year. The change from a monthly window of approximately seven to eight weeks to a weekly window of five to six weeks suggests the company is starting to move toward a balance of supply and demand after the initial buying rush at launch.

We may hear more about the Mac Pro and its supply constraints later this month when Apple announces its earnings for the second fiscal quarter (first calendar quarter) of 2014. Apple will hold its quarterly earnings conference call on April 23 at 5:00 PM Eastern / 2:00 PM Pacific. MacRumors will provide coverage of both the earnings report and conference call at that time.

Apple's handling of this situation is very disappointing.
3 whole months after their 'Shipping announcement' (which already was regrettably late in the year) and they still can't manage better than 5-6 weeks in the country of origin, let alone internationally.

That is a long lead time. Is it because Apple underestimated the demand for the new mac pros and the parts just aren't in the supply chain? Or is there a design or manufacturing issue that we don't know about?

Technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

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Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

Apple needs to make a lot of devices to keep up with demand. The US doesn't have anything like a Foxconn. It's unrealistic to think there could be an equivilant production system in the USA that would benefit from the same econonmoes of scale Foxconn realizes.

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That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States... Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

Quote:

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

It's not about price.

Quote:

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies.

This continues to be one of the stranger comments that pops up. Far more complicated things (manufacturing-wise) are made in far greater numbers in the US all the time.

Sure, but these "far more complicated things" that are produced in the US are produced at facilities that can't ramp production up or down with any speed or in any reasonable time frame. This is a real problem for consumer electronics where demand fluctuates rapidly and a big reason why nobody sane makes electronics in the states.

The inflexibility of US workers, unions, labour laws, etc. may be good for some people and may be OK in industries with steady demand such as cars and airplanes. However, in other ways it really limits the US economy. Its not just that it chased almost all electronics manufacturing overseas, it also is severely constraining sales of successful US products. Take the Tesla for example. They could be selling twice as many but ramping production in the US up to the demand will take two years or more, making the wait for a Mac Pro seem rather brief.

I'm so glad I ordered a refurb iMac. I could have used the extra MP power, but the wait time is terrible for such an expensive item. They really need to get it together. I'll probably upgrade to the next version of the MP, but at this rate I'm guessing those won't be released for two years.

Is it bad I don't really care where my Apple products are made?
Sure I want worker conditions to be better and labor laws, but the United States has plenty of low end/uneducated jobs, our issue is we don't have educated people to fill all our higher end/bachelors + masters jobs.

We are a developed rich nation, we should not still need these manufacturing jobs.